Sincerely, what went horribly wrong with western cartoons?They used to be on the top of the entertainment hierarchy, but now they just live in the glory of their past achievements.
Kids started throwing their money at video game microtransactions instead of cartoon merchandiseFuck off
>>143348516Why doesn't CN hype up crossovers? They tend to just... drop them and say nothing. Like Nickelodeon will promote them for months in advance, they even tried to hype up Spongebob crossing over with himself. Other than the Generator Rex and Ben 10 special, I can't recall them ever trying to hype them up. I spent decades unaware that Billy and Mandy crossed over with the KND when I liked BOTH shows.
>>143348516Flintstones happened.
they lack risk
>>143348516Nepotism Simple as
American suits fucking hate animation, it's never escaped the 'it's for kids" mindset in the west either which killed cartoons being made for anyone over the age of 7, unless they're a Family Guy/Rick and Morty/Simpsons clone with hideous art.For kids media, they basically discovered what was popular in the 90s, and spent the next 20 years trying to make the next Spongebob, or Adventure Time 2. Suits also hate if shows aren't as instantly popular as the aforementioned franchises so a lot of cartoons get murdered after a season or two unless they're merch tycoons like Ben 10.Maxwell Atoms put it pretty well in a blog post, animation is a self hating industry full of corpos who don't respect artists or the medium and would much rather be making money doing live action stuff instead. Now it's so bad that kids these days are almost exclusively into anime, and no one wants to put the money in to make cartoons that have the same quality or appeal as any generic shonen, because it's much easier and cheaper to make a show at medium quality and make it a tax writeoff or kill it early if it doesn't become a hit, as seen by shows like OK KO, Mao Mao, Molly McGee, Owl House etc.
>>143348516In pursuit of more consistent and affordable fluid animation, designs were encouraged to simplify and become intentionally crude and ugly. Drawing something on model with detail is hard, better to have a character that is just 2 circles and some noodle arms instead, we can animate that at 320 frames per second effortlessly. And if your designs are intentionally crude, when you are off model it is much less noticeable because the audience has been trained to accept shit anyway.EVERYTHING about modern american animation has been done to make it cheaper to produce, even when the final product turns out to be more expensive. 3d animation has chased the wet dream of being vastly cheaper than 2d, a tagline that gets execs very hot and bothered, and despite the fact that they have never achieved it they still keep trying. But the one thing they seem to refuse to compromise on is fluidity, when the actual answer is that fluidity was never as important as they thought it was in the first place.Combine this with the fact that cartoons have never escaped the idea that they must by default be comedies. You can mix something in with your comedy, like action or drama, but its still is always expected to be funny. Which is a hell of a limitation to force upon an entire medium of storytelling, and is at least in part to blame for it always being associated with being for kids. On some level, western animation has never really come to terms with the idea that not every cartoon has to be looney toons.
